Welcome to River Valley! The beautiful pieces of glass that can be found along the river here have attracted the most entrepreneurial of woodland creatures to set up shop.

In River Valley Glassworks, you play as one of these pioneers, drafting glass from the market of river tiles. To do so, you have to play a piece from your inventory into the river. Each river tile can take only a specific shape, and you must play into a space adjacent to where you want to draft from. After you pick up your glass, the river shifts forward, revealing new pieces and new opportunities.

Store the glass you pick up strategically in your shop. Depending on how the glass pieces are placed, your score will change drastically. Fill in rows and columns to gain bonus points, but don’t draft too many of one type to avoid negative points!

To set up the game, place the glass pieces into the bag and mix them up. The playmat goes on the table and each of the six river spaces is seeded with the number of stones (1 or 2) printed on that space while the lake at the end gets 5 pieces of glass.  Each player gets their own board, places their character pawn on the start space of the inventory track and then takes 3 random glass pieces and puts them on their pan.

On each turn, you must take one of two action choices: Place/Gather or Draw

Place/Gather – place a single glass piece from your pan onto the river tile which has the matching shapes in the corners OR place any two same-shaped pieces on ANY river tile.  Then, gather all the glass from an adjacent tile from the one you placed on.  You must take all the glass on that tile.  The newly emptied tile is then moved to the back of the line, and it is refilled with a number of glass pieces as seen on the next tile in the river.    All of the collected glass is now placed in your glassworks – and now only the color of the glass matters.  Each column in your board can only hold one color of glass, and you fill in these columns from left to right.  In each column, you start at the bottom and place pieces going upwards.  If you do not have space to hold a piece of glass (out of columns or the color’s column is already full), you must put those pieces into your overflow area.  You will lose VPs for each piece in overflow.  For each piece of glass put into your grid, move your pawn forward one space on the inventory track.

Draw – Draw any 4 pieces of glass from the lake and place them in your pan.  Your pan is limited to 5 pieces, and if you draw past 5, you can place any excess pieces into your overflow.  Refill the lake back up to 5 pieces.

When you have finished either of these actions, the next player takes their turn.  The game continues until one player has reached or exceeded space 17 on their track.  When this happens, each player with  fewer than 3 pieces of glass in their pan can draw up to 3.  Then, the current round is finished and one more round is played.  Finally, players tabulate their scores

The player with the most points wins. There is no tiebreaker.

If you don’t have enough friends around, you can also play the game with a set of solo rules, which is essentially a 2-player game against a robot player that follows a set of rules printed on its board.  You score like normal but each different robot board has its own scoring rules to follow.  Try to beat the robot!

River Valley Glassworks is an easy going collection game.  There is some interesting interplay as the shape matters when gathering pieces but then the color matters when placing pieces.  There is a fair bit of strategy involved in choosing which tiles to collect from – and I’d be sure to note the relative rarity of the different colors of glass (there is a chart helpfully provided on your player board).

As the scoring rewards you for both rows and columns, you’re going for both variety and homogeneity at times.  The catch with the row scoring is that you only score until your first break in the row, so I’d definitely warn you to avoid picking up the rare colors early in the game.  As you have to slot in glass from left to right as you first discover them, you could end up with broken rows if you put a rare color towards the left of the grid.

Conversely, if you are trying to get a super high column score, you could forego the row scoring and wait to put the most common colors all the way on the right of your grid.  Once you have them there, you can then quickly build up those columns for max points… but this is definitely a high risk/high reward strategy.

The game moves along at a fast clip; it does not take very long at all for someone to get to 17 pieces of glass.  I’m not sure how I feel about the rule that lets people draw up to three glass tiles when the endgame is signaled; but hey, for a 15 minute game, a little bit of luck of the draw is not unwelcome.  I’m sure that this rule is just here to prevent a player from getting a final turn where they can’t do anything – but it still feels a bit weird to just bail someone out (or maybe give them a game-winning piece of glass) for their final turn.

Despite this little quirk, I pretty much like everything else about the game.  It really is a surprisingly challenging game that takes such a small slice of gaming time. It’s definitely one of those games that’s easy enough to teach just about anyone but still chewy enough to keep the gamers interested.  As such, it is definitely a keeper, and proof that you can maybe step in the same river twice.

Mark Jackson (16 plays): I love sprawling adventure games, crunch-y/think-y puzzle-y games, and systems with tons of miniatures. But there’s always a place for a really solid family-friendly, particularly with nice production.

And that’s where River Valley Glassworks comes in. The game has some of the same feel as Azul but the scoring is more interesting. It’s short (the longest game we’ve played landed at about 25 minutes) and yet still offers interesting decisions.

There is also a box of variant scoring rule cards that I think will extend the life of this game and allow folks to craft exactly the experience they want. Of course, I haven’t used them yet… since I keep teaching newbies!

Alison Brennan: Add a token to an allowed river space (based on the token’s shape) to collect all the tokens in an adjacent space, trying to fill your warehouse for points for completed rows (a row must contain tokens of different colours) and completed columns (each column can only contain tokens of one colour). Any token you can’t fit (there are more colours than columns) is minus points. There’s minimal look-ahead due to constant change, resulting in downtime, and you’re very subject to fate. Try and keep flexibility in what spaces you can go for and hope for the best. It’s ok, mainly because it finishes appropriately quickly.

Dan B.: It’s a perfectly fine little game, but it’s blinged-out to a much greater degree than is necessary. It was also fine when it was Subastral, which managed the whole thing with cards. (The two games are not identical but are very similar.) Unlike Mark I find Azul more interesting, but I’m certainly willing to play this when asked.

Doug Garrett (7 plays): Shelley and I have enjoyed this one quite a bit, and Mark’s description categorizes River Valley Glassworks perfectly – a solid, family-friendly game with nice production values. It’s quick, easy enough for a non-gamer to grasp, and the polished ‘rocks’ are fantastic and tactile. We discussed it back in January on Episode 977 of the podcast, and even did a video review as well: https://youtu.be/DnNzm_nMheI.

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